


our words are stepping stones

by lady_peony



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, because special chapter 15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2288825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_peony/pseuds/lady_peony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things Seiji never had to ask him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> who spent five days writing this thing that is me.
> 
> horrible exorcists ruined my life and there is no one to blame.

His shadow stretches, a long inky smear until it dips into the river. The fields at his feet are swathed in copper. 

Can he see me? 

His fingers curl in. Hold. He feels his nails touch his palm. Ever so slowly, they unfurl. 

His arm raises stiffly and he waves to the one standing across the water.

 

"I used to think this world had no place for me. At least," He smiles here, a little tired, but eyes bright. "At least, until I knew you." 

"What are you saying! I am not the only one you can be happy with now, isn't that right? You have found things you also want to keep with you too. And I am glad for that." 

Their hands meet, fingers folding together.

"K-Kaoru-kun?"

"Please stay. It is selfish of me to ask but still. Would you-" 

Natori releases the scroll he has open on the table, watches it spring back into a closed curl. Aunt Saya devotedly glued herself to "Destined Stars, Meeting Hearts" every evening. Although their small TV was a good three rooms away from the storeroom, Natori could still hear the sounds of the drama filter through the shoji door. 

He could ask her to lower the volume. The new paper technique he had found on the scroll before him seemed promising, but the steps would require many, many rounds of practice for him to fully master it. True, he had finished his schoolwork an hour ago. True, he may have listened all the way through one or two episodes with something that came close to interest.

Well if anything, he was fond of the noise out of habit. 

As the soft notes of the ending song drifted through the air, Natori stretched and stacked the scroll on top of the mound of papers on his right. He walks out of the storeroom and pointedly turns his glance away from the three-eyed youkai lazily spinning outside the window. 

 

He remembers the sight of a hand rising to mirror his, a dark arc cutting across the ember spill of sky. Or was it his shadow's reflection?

 

Natori glances at the midterm schedule in his hand before folding it in thirds and slipping it into the bag at this side.

He would count it lucky that he can glide through most of his classwork. Yet that afternoon, his history teacher had almost noticed Natori's head nodding when the class was asked "Who can name three contributors to the Kokinshū? Natori-san, perhaps you would like to answer?".

The study of sealing spells and charms had eaten most of his spare time. Natori rubs a hand over his eyes and pushed up his glasses. He would need glasses with real lenses soon at this rate. So many spells and charms for danger upon danger, always danger. 

I promised I would become stronger. I have to be if I want to protect others 

Can you? Another voice slips through his head, laughter woven through its edges. How strong will you become, I wonder, on your own?

Natori's thoughts break when a soft thump sounds behind him.

Natori's plunges his hand into his pocket and whirls. A string of paper whistles from his fingers.

Its path is arrested by another's hand and flutters between them like a hooked fish.

"Matoba-san," Natori says, hand still frozen in the air, palm open.

"Seiji," Matoba Seiji says. "Did you forget me so easily, Shuuichi-san?"

"Was there something you wanted, Matoba-san?" 

Matoba releases the paper and it swoops back to Natori to roost inside his pocket.

"Were you looking for me?" Natori says, voice sharp. The lizard on his body skitters to somewhere around his neck, below his left ear. 

Matoba drops a shoulder and smiles as if tasting a secret. 

"You've improved," is all Seiji says. Their shadows overlap at their feet, until Seiji steps back and strolls down the gold-gilt sidewalk, space unwinding between them. 

Natori thinks he imagines it, but no. There. Seiji's head turns back towards him, a near-mocking glint in a dark eye.

Natori adjusts the school bag on his shoulder, and follows. 

 

This is what Natori learns:

If he wasn't scared of spiders before, he is now.

The scrolls never mentioned anything about exorcists needing naps.

Natori wakes to Seiji counting arrows beside him, pale wrists showing past rolled shirt cuffs as careful fingers move over each arrow. Natori lifts his head to see an unfamiliar dark jacket draped carelessly over his chest.

"I didn't need it," Seiji says lightly, when Natori frowns at him and opens his mouth to ask the question rising to his lips. 

The last thing Natori learns: Matoba Seiji is capable of being thoughtful. Scary. 

 

It's not a regular occurrence. 

Seiji shows up sometimes for three days in a week, then nothing for the next. Natori sometimes thinks of him as a particularly stubborn raincloud, annoying in its unpredictability.

Natori lets the comparison slip during a confrontation with a youkai with minor weather powers. The mud makes it difficult to angle for a decent sealing position and he's almost broken his ankle twice. 

Natori's glasses are misted, but the sound of Seiji's laugh flashes clear over thunder, the same way the sound of his arrows sing through the youkai's miasma. 

The spirit jolts into the jar, and Natori snaps it closed with a flick of his wrist. His fingertips sting with electricity.

 

There is, Natori has to admit, a kind of enviable elegance to Seiji, from the contrast between his relaxed stance and the relentless focus of his gaze. 

Seiji's schoolboy appearance is fragile. Everything else about him is not. 

"Shall we make a wager, Shuuichi-san?" Seiji says. Seiji was in one of his moods again, restless impatience spilling through his words. 

Natori puts down his book on water-based youkai, and uncrosses his knees. The grass crinkled beneath his legs, dried out by the approaching autumn. Seiji had shown up that day as Natori had just walked three blocks away from school, but surprisingly there was no mysterious happening to unravel today. 

"And the prize, Matoba-san?" Natori asks. 

Five minutes later, Natori regrets asking. He still feels winded from the impact his back had made against the hill when Seiji had dodged his third punch and flipped him with nothing more than two hands against his wrist and his elbow. 

"I lost." Natori says flatly, and raises his hand to swipe a spot of blood from his lip. Seiji watches, without a scratch on his face, although Natori thinks Seiji may have been bruised from two of the punches Natori had managed to land on him.

"You did," Seiji agrees, leaning over him with that same accursed smile. 

Natori hates him. 

"So," Natori says, "what is it that you _want?_ "

"Shuuichi-san," Matoba starts, "You're-"

 

"He's with me."

Seiji had said that, the first time they met. Strange to hear it then. Even stranger to hear it now.

The doorkeeper bows once, and steps aside to let them through.

Natori is not loved at these meetings, but he is not turned away either. All their hatred and their love, Natori thinks, is spent on the strongest of them. 

He feels, again, the prickle of eyes on them. The words still rustle the same on an uneasy wind. 

"Ah-hum. Seems the Matobas have their eyes set on the last of the Natoris?"  
"No telling how good he may be, for such a young one."  
"Even if his talent is worth boasting about-"  
"No pride left-"  
"No family-"  
"No name-"

Earlier that month, that year, Natori might have scowled. Put his shoulders up and bristled his way through. 

He tries to smile. He thinks it comes out as a grimace instead. He feels the lizard creep from his elbow to wrap around the knuckles on his right hand.

Seiji walks close enough for their elbows to brush.

"If you look too far behind," Seiji whispers, the words slanting strangely in the tiny hallway, "you will end up straying from your path."

Natori keeps his hands loose and listens to the sound of their combined footsteps over the fading whispers.

At the end of the hall, he sees the woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, with sharp grey eyes behind spectacles. 

"Nanase-san," Seiji says, with a nod. 

Natori stops short. This is about the most respectful tone he has ever heard Seiji use. 

"This is Shuuichi-san," Seiji continues. 

Nanase-san looks over Natori and makes a sound like the sharp whisk of brush on paper.

"Well," she says, "You'll do."

 

Natori does not like Matoba Seiji. 

Seiji is evasive and invasive, irritatingly vague when it suits him. He talks solely in a language of sideway glances and silvertipped words. He drags Natori into danger without a second thought and takes up far too much of Natori's time. 

But still.

The week before, the air was weighted with the promise of summer. The school day had seemed unbearably long to Natori, the ticking of the school clock louder than usual.

Before heading home, he decides to stop at the small ice cream stall sandwiched by the local bakery and the mail office. 

Just as he grasped the chocolate cone the stall owner handed to him, Natori is surprised when a second cone is placed in his other hand.

"I only paid for-"

"For your friend," Kato-san says. 

Natori turns his head to see Seiji at his elbow. Of course. 

"Thank you very much, Kato-san," Natori says, and tries to spin off into a dignified retreat with two ice cream cones in hand. 

Two minutes down the sidewalk, Natori caves and hands over the second cone to Seiji, who had been strolling cheerfully behind him.

When Seiji's hand cradles the cone, he holds it in front of his eyes and stops walking. 

"Well?" Natori says, gesturing slightly with his own cone, "Aren't you going to eat it?"

"I've never had," Seiji murmurs.

"Oh," Natori says. He's not sure what else there is to say. "It's, uh, it's good." 

Cautiously, Seiji lifts the cone to his mouth and takes a small bite, closes his eyes briefly as he tastes it.

He smiles then. 

It's different. 

"You were right, Shuuichi-san," Seiji says. 

If Natori smiled too then, who was there to see? 

Natori does not like Matoba Seiji. 

But Natori _cares_ , and that is perhaps worse.

 

They walk with the past dragging at their heels. It is almost tangible enough that Natori thinks he can _see_ when he turns to search the spaces where people step aside to let them pass. 

Behind him, no one else stands but Seiji, smiling. 

Perhaps Natori didn't mind so much. It was an exorcist's job to protect people from ghosts, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it would be nice to be in an AU in which these two aren't ruining my life

"Release him," Seiji says. His face is blank, unsmiling.

Natori's hands hold perfectly still, even as his heart jumps in sharp staccato against his ribs.

There had already been a hanging haze of wrongness, of decay in the abandoned house by the newly built bridge. Their suspicions had only been confirmed once the shape had slipped through the ceiling to rush towards Matoba, who had been peering through a cracked window towards the road.

Fog is stuck in his throat, oily and burning, and he is seven all over again, clutching the covers in his hands as lighting leaps outside his window and he gasps-

"One more step, _exorcist_ ," he hears his own voice say, echoing oddly, as if from a distance, "and I will tear the air from his lungs."

Natori tries to twitch his fingers, move them towards the sealing jar on his hip. His limbs are stone.

Seiji watches, eyes calculating and dark. He moves two steps back.

"Hold still," Seiji says.

The bow rises, quick as a bird's wing taking flight.

 

There is a shriek, the awful sound yanking itself from his throat at the sensation of ice fleeing his veins, scraping through every inch of skin on the way.

It hurts.

He shifts his head to see a sluggish red pulsing down his arm, but the pain is better than the buzzing cold of before.

His chest feels hollow, an empty gourd. The lizard is skittering agitated loops around his right shoulder.

Everything around him looks watery, smudged figures under a pond's surface.

One outline sharpens when Natori feels something lifting his head from the ground. Seiji's face looms overhead, his fingers resting at the pulse of Natori's neck and lips moving with words which Natori can't hear.

Natori closes his eyes.

One hand fists in the front of Natori's shirt, drags him until he is sitting up against the wall. Natori makes a small sound of protest, shoulder stinging at the movement.

"Hold still," Seiji says evenly. His voice does not shake. Two hands cup Natori's jaw, tilts his head up. "Shuuichi-san, I need you to open your eyes."

When Natori does so, he sees Seiji's face barely an inch from his, pale as bone. His expression is eerily serious.

"Brown," Seiji says. He drops his hands away from Natori's face, but stays crouched over him. "Good."

"Good?" Natori says, voice raspy and unrecognizable. He hisses slightly when Seiji presses one of his hands against his shoulder, hard. The bleeding has mostly stopped but the wound is still open. "One less rival would mean less trouble for you, wouldn't it?"

Seiji's mouth slants strangely at that comment, and he twists his body away to lean against the wall besides Natori. His right hand picks up one of Natori's paper shikigami from the floor, and starts to spin it idly between his fingers.

"It would," Seiji says. The white cuff over his wrist and his fingertips shine red with Natori's blood.

 

Natori is glad for the heat from the two meat buns in the bag in his hand. Winter is riding on the coattails of the wind, stalking through the yellowed grass of the surrounding fields.

Just as he passes the turn of the road, he sees the woman lying in the field, seemingly resting. Her hair is the same flaxen hue as the grass around her.

"Excuse me," Natori says, stepping through the grass to crouch down next to her. "Are you all right?"

"Ah..." she says, scrambling to sit up. She has thin cheeks, but her green eyes are bright. "I will be fine once I reach home. I was just a little tired."

Natori notices the obvious swell of her stomach, and wonders for a moment why she is not resting at a hospital.

At least until he sees her ears. Red and pointed at the tip. Fox.

You could leave her. She doesn't need any help from you.

He could leave.

Instead, Natori finds himself saying, "Take this," and pressing a meat bun into her hands.

She doesn't speak, but stares at the bun with a wide-eyed wonder.

"It will be dark soon," Natori says, to fill the silence. "I think you might want to get home now if you can."

After a moment, she nods once at his words, stands to her feet, and dips a bow towards Natori before taking off into the forest beyond the field. Natori sees a fox tail slip into the bushes and disappear from sight.

Later, when Natori hands the bag with the remaining bun to Seiji, he naturally asks what happened to Natori's share.

"I dropped it," Natori says, trying not to listen to the rustling of the bag as Seiji pulls out the last bun.

"Clumsy," Seiji says. "Are you turning into an old man that quickly, Shuuichi-san?"

Natori makes a subtle attempt to retrieve the bun from Seiji's hand.

"Too slow," Seiji says, taking a sidestep out of Natori's reach, and swallows a bite of pork and cabbage. "I already claimed it."

 

"Seiji-" Natori cuts himself off as the student turns and he realizes that the figure is too tall, the hair too light. Aside from the uniform, little else is similar.

Two weeks. It's been two weeks without a word.

In the crowd of students flowing past his school gates, Natori recognizes a familiar face. She was in his class wasn't she? The class representative?

"Kinomoto-san? Do you know which school that student attends? The one in the black uniform, over there?"

"That uniform?" Kinomoto says, "I've seen it before but I'm not sure.."

"Please," Natori says, flashing a pleading smile. "If you can remember anything...It's important to me."

"Oh," Kinomoto says, lowering her eyelashes. "I-I think I heard from a friend, that the uniform is from a school mostly for students from wealthy families. It should be fifteen blocks or so from our school, on the other side of town. But that's all I know, Natori-san."

"Thank you," Natori says, with another smile. Sincere, this time.

 

Two hours later, Natori is standing in Matoba's house. He almost wishes he hadn't come. Almost.

The room is clean, sparsely furnished except for the table between them and the tea cups resting on top.

The paper over Seiji's face is unfamiliar and Natori can't stop his eyes from resting on it. The robes too, are new.

Seiji is smiling and Natori wants to.

He wants to scream.

"This is unexpected," Matoba Seiji says. "What brought you to visit today, Shuuichi-san?"

"I brought your assignments," Natori says, smiling back. Normal. He should act as normal right?

"My...assignments?" Seiji sounds surprised. "I see." The smile this time is not as bland, not as ceramic-smooth.

Less closed, Natori thinks. Something eases in his throat at that.

The stack of papers slides onto the table between them and the two steaming cups.

"Besides that, Shuuichi-san," Seiji says, "Why are your glasses cracked?"

"It was windy and they fell on the ground," Natori says.

Seiji turns his head to glance down towards the table at the papers.

"Could you hand me the first assignment?" Seiji says. "I am not too used to reading like this but there's no helping it."

Once Natori passes the paper across the table to Seiji, he intends to draw back. He doesn't expect Seiji's hand to shoot out and grab onto his, wrapping tightly over his palm and his fingers.

"Liar," Seiji says, curiously. "Your hand is bleeding. An ayakashi?"

Natori does not reply. Seiji doesn't let go of his hand.

"No," Natori mutters eventually, not meeting Seiji's eyes. "I...I just visited your school to pick up the assignments. And there...there were other students."

_Matoba Seiji? His family name is nothing more than a lucky charm for superstitious fools._  
 _Lucky? If we're lucky, he will have been eaten by the monsters they always rave about. Or maybe he's finally left school._  
 _If only. He should know he doesn't belong here with the rest of us._

"You fought? You fought with someone?" Seiji says, tone almost amused now. "What could have made you angry? Nothing at that place has anything to do with-"

Nothing there has anything to do with you. Natori knows how the sentence ends.

"They were hateful and cruel when you couldn't defend yourself, and _nobody_ deserves that. _You_ don't deserve that!"

Natori doesn't realize he is shouting until his voice cracks on the last word. Embarrassment surges through with his earlier fury, and he feels raw, dizzy with the unsaid words churning under his tongue.

"I should let you rest," Natori says, quieter now, and he scrambles to his feet, hand slinging his schoolbag over his shoulder.

"Shuuichi-san."

Natori stops. Doesn't he always when he asks?

Seiji's hand is on his shoulder, barely creasing the fabric there. Natori turns, meaning to break away.

The hand moves from his shoulder down to his wrist. Seiji lifts Natori's right hand, upwards, and-

There is a brush of heat between his knuckles, a lingering breath of air when Matoba lifts his head and releases Natori's hand.

Natori stands, thoughts darting in a hundred directions like fish, silvery ripples blooming in their wake.

"I-" Natori starts.

The strong scent of tea is suddenly unbearable.

"I-"Natori tries again, and forces the rest of the sentence out. "I'll see you tomorrow!"

His hand touches the door when he hears Matoba echo "Tomorrow," behind him, the word curling in the air like a promise.

 

The string of tomorrows unrolls lazily, similar in succession.

He goes to school. He takes up with drama club, at a classmate's suggestion. He likes it more than he expected to.

And of course, he works- competes, Natori thinks- on exorcisms with Seiji.

He's surprised by how easy it all is.

The days are similar, but they are never boring.

There are still arguments of course. About exorcism methods, on what to do with captured ayakashi, and who needed to work more on drawing their sealing charms.

The worst happens at the beginning of Natori's senior year, when Natori raised his head from the math book in his lap and said, "I'll be working as an actor next year while studying. Somewhere in the city, likely."

Seiji was- angry was not the right word. Disdainful did not quite fit either.

Disappointed might have been the closest.

His family might have been, too, but the Natoris could ill afford to sneer at anything about their finances.

There are words then between them then, some harder than others, some softer.

And after it all, Natori still senses Seiji watching him when he leaves, a dark silhouette against shedding maple trees.

The river blurring past the window looks beautiful at that speed, snaking off behind him like an unwinding thread.

 

It's a rainy summer day when Natori steps off the bus with two bags in hand.

The air smells clear, alive. Droplets dance over his head and scatter over each lens of his glasses.

Natori hums softly as he walks along the road, unmindful of the water plastering his hair to his forehead.

An hour, or seconds, or minutes later, he sees someone waiting at the side of the road, a red umbrella tucked under the sleeves of dark robes.

Natori stops, and frowns or smiles at the one he has recognized.

"Seiji."

"Shuuichi-san," Seiji says.

Nothing else needed to be said.


End file.
